Günther Oettinger said the recent Sony hack had shown Europe the need to radically reshape the way data is used. Photograph: Jan Haas/ Jan Haas/dpa/Corbis

A new UN agency for data protection and data security is needed to protect the confidential and personal information of citizens around the world, the European commissioner for digital economy told delegates at the World Economic Forum on Thursday.

Günther Oettinger said the recent Sony hack, which exposed swaths of confidential and personal information, had shown Europe the need to radically reshape the way data is used.

“We are in a digital revolution, and we need a data revolution in parallel,” Oettinger said in a panel alongside Sir Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, and Yahoo’s boss, Marissa Mayer. He said the stream of revelations following Sony’s data breach had shown that Brussels must take a lead in restoring trust in tech companies.

Edward Snowden’s revelations about the extent to which government agencies have been intercepting their citizens’ digital communications have pushed data security high up the agenda at Davos this year.

Mayer told Davos that Yahoo had immediately changed the way it handled and encrypted data when the Snowden revelations came to light. Asked how Yahoo would handle a request for data access from an oppressive regime, she replied: “What we have seen from the Snowden allegations is that whether they’re coming through the official channels or not to access the data, they’re accessing the data.”

Berners-Lee said that the battle between privacy and security should not be a pendulum, swinging between giving agencies yet more or less access to data. At the moment, he warned, there is no way of testing what someone does with data if granted permission to obtain it through the courts.

“I want to break out of that pendulum,” he said. “So let’s go down the way of accountability, so we can say yes, you can have the data, but I’m going to talk to the people who are overseeing you about how you use it.”

Berners-Lee told delegates that the tech industry needed to pay more attention to whether its actions were actually good for users. He cited the example of applications that sprung up to let iPhone users turn on the flashlight. Many would then immediately request access to other applications to access data.

“Their whole model is to steal data, and build models, and not help you at all,” Berners-Lee said. But the man who created the first protocols that underpin the web more than 25 years ago warned that a new architecture would be needed to guarantee privacy.

Oettinger said the first priority was to ensure that companies and organisations in Europe were properly transparent, before then pushing on for a credible global common understanding on the issue. “We need a UN agency for data protection and data security,” he declared.

Michael Fries, the president and CEO of cable giant Liberty Global, questioned Oettinger’s vision for a new global deal on data.

“It is not possible in the near term. I think it’s going to take several years,” Fries warned.

Bosses of technology companies also asserted that there was a social good for technology. Sheryl Sandberg, the boss of Facebook, said technology “gives voice to someone who has traditionally not had that”. She said giving women access to technology in developing countries was more beneficial than men as they passed the knowledge on to their children.

“Women will not have the same opportunity to participate as men, it takes an active and different role than we’ve had before,” she said to applause. But, she said the only way to make access available was to make it cheaper. “Sixty percent of the internet today is not in English,” she said, which showed that it lacked diversity.

Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, said improving broadband, and making it more accessible, would solve “almost all of the problems we face”.